The Drive

This summer I impulsively agreed to drive the three thousand kilometers from Toronto to Calgary with my mum. It was her 57th birthday, and she asked me, and-- well-- I can't say no to people I love. It's a bad habit and I know I should fix it, but there it is. I have this silly, deep seeded, Joyce inspired ideal that love means saying yes ad infinitum. Yes I said yes I will yes, and all that.

 By nature, driving is impressionistic. Defined by speed and a deliberate, quantified, marking of time. The fleeting images of Northern Michigan were sobering in their back woods reality. The family friends we stayed with on the Manitoba/Ontario border were living out their post-Scarface existence with plenty of hash and vodka and velvet and faux gold furniture. I saw no moose but many road kill deer, beautiful in their contorted road side death. The prairies were flat as they've ever been, but passing from western Manitoba into eastern Saskatchewan is all canola fields and huge blue skies and salt flats, and it brought up the strongest surge of nostalgia I've felt in months. When Mum fell asleep I turned the radio to a cheesy country station, brought the car up to 130, and I thought about being a teenager and felt grateful and sad all at once.

Growing up in the prairies is strange. It's like always being the last kid picked for the team because you don't have a real city or an ocean or mild weather. Like being the last kid picked for the team but the first to dance because you grew up hard and beautiful and god damn it all you have the best skies. And you know every fucking word to that stupid country song about barbecue stains and white t-shirts.

Calgary always pins me down and kicks me around. It's hard to go back, again and again, to the place I've been exiled from. They know it and I know it-- I left, and when I'm back I'm never back for long, and I'm happy being away from its bullshit. I tell  2, maybe 3 people I'm there, and the rest I hope not to run into. It's easier this way: no expectations, no commitments, no drama, no conversation. Some of them, fuck, we can't even be in the same room.

We drove and drove and Canada slipped away past the windows and under the wheels and it felt like coming home and leaving home in the same moment. Returning and running, coming back to say goodbye.

In the mouth of the wolf...

kill that wolf.

canada

0

you start to ebb away from me
the light begins to fade
and I find myself grasping for glowing remnants

words
tokens

I stuff them into sealed jars hidden beneath the mattress like a hoarder.

But I sit tall at our dusk
praying for our dawn

WANT

dreamlife/reallife

your absence pervades my dreams
I searched for you for hours last night
and woke up
again and again
confused
at being
alone in our bed

AG takes good pictures

kerouac, 

by 

ginsberg 

thank god Faulkner is here to keep my brain off the holes in my mouth and my big ol caricature of a face

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lovely and inviolate sand
(from The Sound and the Fury)

burning in water drowning in flame

everything is inverted

flip flopping

opposite

Mister I'm struggling to stay calm


x

'tis too starved a subject for my sword

When Lucien regaled Burroughs with a tale of how he had recently instigated a fight between Kammerer and a gay artist- an altercation that ultimately wound up with Lucien’s biting both the painter and Kammerer- Burroughs dismissed the incident with a single line. "In the words of the immortal Bard,’ Burroughs said, pulling from memory a quotation from Troilus and Cressida, "‘tis too starved a subject for my sword"


on the meeting of minds/madness, on indifference and pre-heroin Burroughs, on the youngness of poor old tragic Lucien Carr, on Ginsberg recounting Lucien Carr conversation with William S. Burroughs, from Schumacher's Ginsberg biography Dharma Lion

albertanxiety

going back to the prairies tomorrow and I'm looking forward to getting me a big ol piece of sky fortunately unfortunately I always get a bit of the fear going home there's monsters in my hometown monsters that I've known and been and fucked and seen and filled my veins with the fear starts itching my nerves start moving around my body and I know my history is around every corner

wa wa wa waiting 
in my dreams you are waiting still
(I wake terrified of love)
in my real I'm not allowed to know
(better this way, suit up and forget)

alberta alberta you tired old slut you make me a tired old slut

just 'cause an old dog comes back don't mean ya feed it

Orchestral fury of violent sadness

piercing down to the blood.

(sharp searing violin notes)

(chaotic violet stirrings)

chasing as the wind chases

moaning as the old moan

I stand cold and blind on the edge of this inkpool I used to lie in-

I stand shivering against a history still roaring for recognition-

Floating in, barely perceivable,

wisps of gray smoke creeping under the door.

I can smell the sadness before I feel it.

We were regular Hemingway gipsies about some things

They got savaged a lot and softened a lot, their secret brutalized them and darkened them and very often it made them beautiful.

-Michael Herr, Dispatches

Visions of Canadian Heroin in Glamourous American Waste Land

In a Vegas cafeteria-

We were smacking on greasy bits, high off bright lights, big sound,

and this gossipy little hometown bird flitted in, came chirping up to me,

tweeting tales from my northern motherland-

Singing of a party

where she saw

my ex-lover-

needle in one arm

drug all over his face.

I woke unsettled and sick

You died 41 years ago today...

But we are still listening Jack

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

cremation

when I woke up early this morning, and ( ) had left a few hours before to drive the oceanside highway home (he's probably a good man most of the time, and shows up to work in the mountains when he should), and there was a bag of nectarines hanging on my door, and there was a half empty bottle of bourbon on my kitchen table, and it was cloudy, and the power was out, I knew.

today was the day.

so I tied my hair back with a black scarf, poured a big glass of ( )'s forgotten whiskey, smoked two cigarettes and burnt the tips of my fingers lighting X's love letters on fire.

they burnt slow and I got a bit drunk, tuesday morning and what do I have to show for it? a jar of ashes and a good man's care who will never get in, really.

honey-girl, prisoner-boy.

Right before daybreak the desert is cool and calm and everything is silence and stillness.
Holy stillness. Wind is slow and lazy, owls wander into sleep. Two hours (two minutes? two years?) after dawn my skin must be golden and blinding, and my skin burns with hundreds (thousands?) of insects, sucking and biting, sucking and biting my honey-coated skin. Every day. Honey. Every day. Good morning, welcome to your sweet, sticky punishment. Welcome to your glowing damnation.

By midday the sun must hit my skin at the most divine angle. There must be the most ludicrous glare. It must be impossible to look at me. Shining beast. Glorious prisoner. O skin o skin o skin fall off already. Peel into sticky shreds. Release my bones. Undo me from the cement block I'm chained to. Forget the desert.

At nightfall, she (he?) brings two dogs (it could be four). At nightfall he brings three dogs when the guard falls asleep (do they guard the half-dead? the honey-coated? am I important enough for guards?). Her dogs start at my toes and lick up my feet and ankles, cleaning off my honey coat. Dog-lovers. Desert saviours. When they are satiated with my sweetness they curl up, honey-tongued, by my feet and ward off rattlesnakes. Dogs.

One night he (she?) kissed me right above my shackles. Right over the metal.
Kindness.
O kindness, kindness. O sweet kindness.

The Sofa

Your letter stayed unopen on my table
For several days. If you were friend enough
To believe me, I was about to start writing
At any moment; my mind was savagely made up
Like a serious sofa moved
Under a north window. My heart, alas

Is not the calmest of places.
Still it is not my heart that needs replacing:
And my books seem real enough to me,
My disasters, my surrenders, all my loss...
Since I was child enough to forget
That you loathe poetry, you ask for some-
About nature, greenery, insects, and, of course,
The sun- surely that would be to open
An already open window? To celebrate
The impudence of flowers? If I could

Interest you instead in his large, gentle stares,
How his soft shirt is the inside of pleasure
To me, why I must wear white for him,
Imagine he no longer trembles
When I approach, no longer buys me
Flowers for my name day...But I spread
On like a house, I begin to scatter
To a tiny to-and-fro at odds
With the wear on my threshold. Somewhere
A curtain rising wonders where I am,
My books sleep, pretending to forget me.

(Medbh McGuckian)

Cures for Insomnia Vol. 2

sleep well lovebugs

x

Alberta, Winter

I came back as a wolf/ You were expecting me/ Tapping long fingers on a wooden table…

Everything is rhythm and pattern and tension- everything.

Everything is rhythm and pattern and tension-
Violence is rhythm and pattern and tension and I’ve been feeling pretty damn violent on this frozen tundra in this fucking ghost town empty streets full buildings unnatural I thought you were prairie folk sky lovers dirt holders but I’ve been walk-walk-walkin your streets Albertans and you’re scurrying into your plus 15s and your shopping malls like rats to sugar leaving me to enjoy the overwhelming vastness of the sky the incredible brightness of the sun the big empty roads and the careless piles of snow built up into primeval ice cave or accidental sculptures.

I’ve been scrapping and yelling with your locals, breathing in your dry cutting air.

I came back as a wolf/ You were expecting me/ Tapping long fingers on wooden tables/ I came back/ You were expecting/ I came/ You were/ I/ You / /